CoRAL

Comparative Religions and Literatures (CoRAL) promotes the reciprocal and dynamic relationship between religions, literatures and cultures.

We cite Derek Walcott's description of 'coral' in his poem, Omeros (1990), as a communal, living, evolving form to shape our research objectives. Walcott's imagining of coral through metaphors of hybridity and patience is suggestive of our exploration of religions as historical, cultural, social and phenomenological sites that allow for and enable new ways of reading and interpreting texts.

where coral diedit feeds on its death, the bones branch into more coral,

and contradiction begins. It lies in the schismof the starfish reversing heaven; the mirror of Historyhas melted and, beneath it, a patient, hybrid organism

grows in his cruciform shadow. For a cityit had coral pantheons. No needling steeplemagnetized pilgrims, but it grew a good people.

Recent books in Emma Mason and Mark Knight's series for Bloomsbury include Stephen Shapiro and Philip Barnard, Pentecostal Modernism: H.P. Lovecraft, Los Angeles and World Systems Culture; Adam Miller, The Gospel According to David Foster Wallace: Boredom and Addiction in an Age of Distraction; and Michael Tomko's The Suspension of Disbelief: Poetic Faith from Coleridge to Tolkien.